


Maniac

by theangelswans



Series: that a ghost should be [1]
Category: Villains Series - V. E. Schwab
Genre: AU post Canon, CW Self Harm, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Post-Canon, Vicious - Freeform, aka eli's terrible behaviour, also some questionable tense changes probably, cw death themes, cw suicidal ideation, eli-typical self harm, im sorry guys, in which i am incapable of writing anything other than angst, the mature rating is just for the warnings listed, vengeful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-03-07 15:32:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18876034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theangelswans/pseuds/theangelswans
Summary: Sydney has been searching for Victor, and while she doesn't age, he does, and she can't waste any more time. So she turns to the person who's best at finding EO's, because death has never meant much to her anyway when she can change it.(or, in which Sydney brings Eli back from the dead to find Victor.)





	1. Eli

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Eli is brought back from the dead and not very happy about it

—

1 – Eli

_Your fragile heart and your paper skin_  
_Such a beautiful boy filled with so much sin_  
_Your reflection is your very worst enemy_  
_Behind the glass is an angel, but the devil's beneath_

—

It’s cold.

That’s the first thing he feels. _coldcoldcoldcoldcoldcold_ _coldcoldcold_.

It’s dark. He’s freezing, and distantly he feels he should be scared that he isn’t able to rub his arms to warm up. He can’t seem to move at all, but all he can think of right now is that feeling of peace. The dark is oppressive, grasping at him from every angle so that he doesn’t feel like a body at all and nothing more than a consciousness, but the oblivion is a relief. Like he just woke up from a pleasant dream and he wants to close his eyes again and fall back asleep. It’s peaceful, more than he ever felt killing his father, more than killing EO’s. More than anything he’s ever had in his life.

And then he’s falling.

But there’s light off in the distance, snaking through the darkness and entwining around him like a severed thread about to devour him. He fights against it but it’s too strong. He’s not falling, he realizes. He’s being pulled.

Eli Ever opens his eyes.

“Finally,” chimes in a male voice, and in its background, the heavy breathing of a woman.

No, not a woman. A young girl. A young girl with the power to bring back the dead.

Eli wants to scream.

He pitches forward and runs his fingers through his hair, grabbing at the strands. He breathes heavily, unsteadily, his chest shaking with movement it probably hasn’t had in a while. His old knowledge from med school supplies him with facts about rigor mortis, and he has to silence them because nothing like that ever applies when it comes to EO’s. He shouldn’t be able to move, but he can. He shouldn’t be able to breathe, but he can. He shouldn’t be alive, and he really, desperately, wishes he wasn’t.

“Eli Cardale,” Sydney says, but she’s not looking at him and instead reading the nameplate on his drawer in the morgue.

Eli unfurls, embarrassed that he allowed the two of them to see him like that but also too distraught to care. He looks to the side where Sydney stands, looking at the place he’d been resting. She’s a few steps away now, arms crossed over her body, and it’s a defensive posture if Eli ever saw one.

Mitch is in front of him with his arms down at his sides, one hand holding what looks like an EON issued cattle prod. He glares down at Eli, while his eyes shift from him to Sydney every few seconds like he expects Eli to suddenly lunge at him.

He looks down at himself, and finds he’d been draped with the same white sheet he’d seen on so many other bodies at crime scenes. He gathers some of the cloth in his fists and his eyes go unfocused.  

“Why?” Eli chokes out. His throat feels rough and dry.

Sydney looks up at him and straightens herself out, dropping her arms to her sides and forming her mouth into a stern line, but she can never quite achieve ‘intimidating’ when she still looks thirteen years old.

“I’ve been searching for two years, and while I don’t age, Victor does. I can’t afford to waste time.”

_Ah, so Victor left them in the end_ , Eli muses.

Sydney continues. “You’re the best at finding EO’s, and you’re going to help me find him.”

“And,” Mitch inserts. “I hate to say it, but you know him the most out of anyone.”

Eli hugs his knees to his chest. The white sheet pools around his hips and hangs off the side of the metal table he’s lying on.

“That I do,” Eli says, drawing in an unsteady breath.

There’s a pause, and he can clearly tell that Sydney is getting impatient, but Eli wishes she had never come here at all and just left him alone.

He swings his legs over the side of the table to get up, but it’s so fast and sudden that the two of them must have thought he was making an attack. Mitch swings his arm and hits him in the spine with the cattle prod, and everything goes blue and white. Eli hits the floor with a sharp crack, and something within him breaks, but he can’t think about what it is right now with all the electricity coursing through his body. He grapples for the source of the pain, for something to hold on to, for stability, but all he can do is twitch and grit his teeth until its over.

Mitch pulls away the cattle prod and the electric convulsions stop. Eli splays his hands over the cold concrete, hanging his head. He tries to breathe. In. out. Mitch is saying something about how he’ll do it again if Eli ever tries anything, but the words feel like they’re coming from far away. Eli feels like he’s underwater.

“I won’t try anything,” he says, gasping for air. He raises his head, gathers the sheet around his waist, and stands. “And I’ll help you.”

Sydney’s eyes light up, but she tries very hard not to let her excitement show on her face. She’s scared too, looking up at him, and he can tell. She sets her expression into discontentment, trying not to let any emotions show on her face, but its so obvious. She’s scared and angry and excited, and everything is so clear to Eli that he can discern exactly which emotion belongs to which thought. Having to work with the man that tried to kill her: disgust, fear. The possibility of finding Victor again: hope.

She’s weighing the options. Bouncing them back and forth in her mind, trying to decide which is worth more. Eli doesn’t know how much she means to Victor, but he clearly means a lot to her. And wherever emotion is involved, people can always be manipulated.

“On one condition,” Eli says.

His throat is sore from disuse, but he doesn’t let that bother him. It’ll heal anyway.

“You don’t get to make demands!” Sydney snaps.

Eli takes a step forward. Sydney steps back, then a look appears on her face that says she didn’t mean to do that and regrets it.

“You get more of that serum, and kill me. Just like you did last time,” Eli says.

At this, she smiles.

—

He’s been dead two years.

Sydney told him this back at the morgue, but he was too freaked out to listen to her, too preoccupied with missing that feeling of peace. As they leave the morgue, her and Mitch give him some folded gray clothes—captive EON attire they stole, of course—and bring him back to their current hotel. Nobody says anything at all on the way there, and Mitch keeps looking at him in the rear-view mirror. Eli just looks out the window and sighs.

The room is nice, in a good hotel in the upper part of town. Mitch instructs him not to touch anything, and Eli wants to be annoying and argue, saying that he has to touch things in order to work, but he really just doesn’t have the energy and only nods. Mitch seems a little surprised by the easy agreement, and Eli takes some satisfaction in that, at least.

Sydney has disappeared. Eli figures she doesn’t want to be around him any more than he wants to be back. He can’t really blame her.

He stands in front of the calendar for too long, just staring at it. Mitch calls him away even though he isn’t doing anything wrong, and Eli sees the man is thoroughly creeped out.

Sydney reappears with several folders, stuffed with files, photos, and newspaper articles. Her and Mitch set Eli up on a table by the window to the side of the living area, where he then gets to work at tracking down his old roommate. It reminds him of old times.

Everything they’ve gathered so far isn’t enough, even with Mitch’s hacking. Eli wonders at their investigative skills because of how little information they’ve managed to gather. He never knew much about hacking and had to rely on more conventional methods before he got caught by EON. He still was able to get more done, even without Serena. No wonder they haven’t been able to find Victor.

With Mitch’s hacking, Eli figures he can find him in a matter of weeks. He plans to keep working until then. He doesn’t need to eat or sleep, so he devotes all his time to tracking down leads, searching the internet, and all of their available info. He’s always sitting at a table off to the side, watching as the world outside turns from bright and busy daylight, to neon and quiet night. Days turn into weeks, and the hotels they stay in change constantly. They move after a few weeks, or a few days, depending on whether they’ve been recognized, or if Eli finds some information where it would be more convenient to move closer, or even if Mitch gets a bad feeling.

Eli doesn’t believe in whatever Mitch is using to determine ‘bad luck’ as he calls it, but he learns early on that nobody cares. Whatever he says has to be relevant to the search or it wont be acknowledged. They don’t need his opinions or his thoughts, only his ability. He’s largely ignored by both Sydney and Mitch, who try to go about their days as usual, even with him there. They place him out of the way where he can do his research and not bother them. Sydney startles whenever he gets up, and he receives a glare from Mitch like its his fault for her decision to bring him into this.

Eli feels like an outsider. He is. He’s just the man that sits at a table and does their work for them.

They do not talk to him unless they have to. He does not speak unless he finds something, or if they want an update on his progress. There are usually only two beds in the rooms. They do not offer him one, and he does not need it.

Sometimes Mitch cooks dinner with Sydney, and Eli watches them in the reflection on the window. Sometimes they put on music and dance. Sydney bumps her hip against his as they hand vegetables back and forth. Both of them smile so brightly, and Eli observes the way they express how happy they are with each other. He wonders if other families are like this too. He wonders how lucky Victor had to be to get one like theirs.

There is a tightening feeling in Eli’s chest, and it reminds him that he needs to get back to work. Mitch lays out the food on the counter and sits down beside Sydney to eat. They do not offer him any. He does not need it.

—

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's like 5 people in this fandom and nobody cares about Eli but this is more for me anyway because there's not enough content in this fandom and I'm bored ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> The lyrics are from the song Maniac by Phoebe Green.


	2. Sydney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Sydney questions her decision.

—

2 – Sydney

—

It’s snowing outside.

Sydney watches the flakes fall from the sky and drift past the windows, going further down than she can see. The clouds gather together in patches of grey, and occasionally a crow will pass by, but that’s it. This room has spectacular windows the cover almost the whole wall, with diaphanous lavender curtains pulled to the side. But its too high up and from where she is, she can’t see where the snow is going, only where its coming from as it begins is slow descent.

She’s sitting at the breakfast bar, since Eli has since commandeered the little (and only) dining table for his research. Sydney feels her eyes drift to it, even though he’s not there. She can still hear the shower running so she knows he’s not coming out soon, but just the thought of him there is enough for her nerves to stand on end.

She taps her fingers on the marble surface of the counter, the other hand propping her chin up as she stares at the lunch Mitch made her. she hasn’t touched her grilled cheese. She doesn’t feel hungry, but she didn’t feel hungry at breakfast either, so Mitch made her food for now whether she asked for it or not. Reasonably, she doesn’t want to waste his efforts. But she feels too queasy to eat anything—she’s been feeling like that a lot since Eli started travelling with them.

She hates him. She wants him _gone_.

Gone, as in dead, which is how she made him two years ago, and how he should have stayed. But she needs Victor back. everything feels lopsided without him, like someone cut a big whole out of her life and now she’s living in just two thirds of a family.

She thought she could find him on her own. She tried—tried nearly everything. She’d never have resorted to bringing back Eli if she wasn’t desperate. But she misses Victor. And, even if she tries not to think about it, and definitely doesn’t want to admit it, the prospect of a life prolonged scares her. She wants all the time she can have with those she cares about before they old without her.

She still doesn’t know if it was the right decision. Victor would probably say something about there being too many variables, not enough control over the situation—because Sydney wasn’t foolish enough to think she could fully control Eli Cardale.

She wonders if he’ll break lose and kill her. She wonders about that a lot.

He could kill her, or Mitch, or more EO’s, or the whole damned city if he wanted to. He’s determined, if nothing else. But so is she. And she wont let him.

Sydney has stopped tapping her fingers on the breakfast bar and realizes she’s tightened her hand into a fist. She quickly releases it and drops it to her side as Mitch comes into the little  kitchenette. He gets himself a glass of chocolate milk and comes to sit down next to her. A heavy silence hangs over the two of them. Sydney sighs and slumps down on the table, resting her head on her folded arms. Mitch looks up from his milk at her.

“Do you think this was a mistake?” she asks.

Mitch raises an eyebrow at her uneaten grilled cheese. “The sandwich?”

Sydney swats at his arm. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, but you also need to eat,” he replies.

There’s silence for a beat, and Sydney ends up taking a few bites of her sandwich. It’s so much better than anything she ever got at home and she’s filled with love for Mitch and his endless ability for cooking. Still, that soundless weight is there, holding all the things neither of them are saying.

It’s not like Sydney didn’t think about it beforehand. She did. And she knew then that it was a mistake.

She didn’t want to bring back Eli. Her and Mitch both knew how dangerous that could be, trying to manipulate him into working toward their goals when all he ever did was move toward his own, no matter who got hurt. Sydney was one of those people he hurt.

Eli Ever is an unstable force, too much for the world to handle. She didn’t know if she could, when he had outsmarted an entire organization dedicated to capturing and killing EO’s. It took enough for her to be able to kill him the first time—and that was when there was the serum. She has none of it now, so Eli would be practically untouchable. There’s no way she could possibly control him.

And he terrifies her.

She remembered that cold day when he shot her and she barely escaped. She remembered all those dreams of him taking away everything she held dear. She looked at him and felt her heart skip, lurch, and speed up. She hated him with every fiber of her being, and she wanted him to stay dead for the rest of eternity so that he could never hurt anyone ever again.

But she needs Victor back.

He was there for her after Serena brought her to Eli. After Eli hurt her and she didn’t know if she would bleed out and die alone on the side of a highway. She didn’t know where to go, and Victor had picked her up and taken her pain away and she’d become part of his family in return. Just like that day out on the lake, her thoughts echoing _come back, come back_ , she needed him to _come back_.

_Want_ is powerful. _Need_ is something else entirely.

“I understand that you want to find Victor. I do, too,” Mitch says, like he can read every thought like its written on her face. “But, to bring back _Eli_?”

Sydney swallows and finishes her sandwich before speaking. “He’s the best option.”

“There were others,” Mitch says.

He’s not looking at her, but Sydney imagines his disapproval at her decision. But that cant be right, she thinks, because they made the decision together. Maybe she’s being paranoid, or maybe she’s overthinking—

“Why are you fighting me on this?” Sydney asks, voice quivering.

Mitch holds her gaze, because he’s not one to look away.

 “Victor was your friend too!” she exclaims.

Tears spill down her face. Still, Mitch doesn’t tell her not to cry, and she’s grateful for that. He just gives her a sad smile. She can hear the wind howling outside, bashing against the glass.

“But you’re what’s most important,” he says. “Eli is too smart and too powerful for his own good, or anyone else’s. I don’t wanna see you get hurt.”

Sydney sniffles. “Thanks.”

“And you obviously hate having him here.”

Sydney looks down at the empty plate in front of her and trails her finger around the rim absently.

“Well, _duh_.”

Mitch stifles a laugh. Sydney nudges him with her shoulder, but when she pushes into him, he wraps an arm around her. She leans her head on him.

“I keep trying to ignore him and live how we used to…after Victor went away. But he’s just so _there_ , you know?”

She feels Mitch nod.

“I’m afraid to sleep sometimes because I wonder if he’s going to wait until then to kill me. He’s still awake when I go to bed and I can hear him when I close my eyes. He’s still there when I wake up. He never sleeps.”

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Mitch says.

“I don’t know how Victor could stand him for so long,” she answers.

Sydney pulls away from Mitch and slouches in her chair, fiddling with her hands in her lap. There’s still grease on her fingers from the sandwich and Dol starts licking them, which makes Sydney giggle. She gets off the chair to pet him, and he’s almost the same height as she is while bent over, not even while kneeling on the ground. She tries to ruffle behind his ears but he keeps licking her fingers.

“Stop that!” she pulls one hand away, while the other remains on Dol’s head. “It tickles!”

Mitch watches them and can’t help the smile that spreads across his face. He looks at Dol. “Normally I would tell you to cut it out, but I guess its okay this one time,” he says.

The big dog takes this affirmation to heart and leans into Sydney, nudging her chest with his head. Sydney wraps her arms around his neck and hugs him, burying her face in his fur. Mitch gets up and puts a hand on her back.

“I know why you made your decision,” he says. Sydney looks up at him from over Dol’s fur. “I know what you’re fighting for.”

“You do?” Sydney asks.

Mitch nods. “Mm. I understand. And this family will fight for you too.”

Sydney smiles at him, but feels a few tears slip down her cheeks too so she buries her face in Dol’s fur again.

—

Sydney can’t sleep.

She’s been tossing and turning for hours, and while Mitch is sound asleep, she can’t get her body to do the same. She lies on her back and stares at the ceiling for a while, but its boring and useless, so she decides to finally just give up and get up.

She sighs and sits up, throwing off the covers and sticking her feet into the panda slippers Mitch got her at the gift shop two hotel’s ago. She moves toward the kitchen, but she can see _him_ in the corner of the room. Eli Cardale. The man who shot and tried to kill her. The man she shot and actually finished the job.

He’s still at his research, the files scattered all across the table and a few crumpled up on the floor. He’s typing on his laptop, and the light of the screen reflects back at him, illuminating his face in an eerie blue glow that’s doubly unnerving in the pitch darkness of the room. Occasionally he’ll scribble a note on a yellow pad of paper to his left, then go back to typing. Sydney is technically the one watching him right now, but it still feels like she’s the one being watched.

“Is there something you need?” Eli asks.

Sydney startles. Well, at least that confirmed her suspicion, even though she hates being right about it.

“I was just wondering how you can keep doing that all the time,” she asks.

It’s the first thing she’s said to him that isn’t perfunctory instructions or warnings. Eli doesn’t turn around, and doesn’t even stop typing except for to wait long enough for a document to load.

“Because I have to,” is all he says.

Sydney sits on one of the egg-shaped chairs in the kitchen. In this hotel, the chairs don’t have backs, which is a downside, but they swivel all the way around, which is more of a bonus anyway. She plants her slippered feet on the circle of metal going around the pole that attaches the chair to the floor, and begins gently swaying back and forth.

“Don’t you need to sleep?” she asks.

“No,” Eli replies, laconically.

“ _Can_ you sleep?”

“I would prefer not to, but yes.”

He doesn’t stop working, even as he speaks. He’s shuffling through documents, typing on his computer, then looking through files that are on the edge of the table and close to falling on the floor. He’s writing notes with his left hand and brushing hair out of his eyes with his right, and Sydney would find this all very rude if it was someone other than him. She doesn’t mind now though, because she doesn’t know if she could handle talking to him if he was looking straight at her. With his back turned away, even if it’s a foolish thought, she feels like she has the upper hand, and it gives her confidence. If he were facing her, she’d probably throw something at him.

“Are you afraid?” she asks.

Eli stills, just for a moment. The air goes silent.  

“No,” he answers her, but his voice is quieter than before.

She doesn’t know what made her ask that. He doesn’t _look_ afraid; she didn’t think he even had the capability. Because what would he even have to be afraid of when nothing can hurt him?

Outside, Sydney hears a car honk. This room is a lot closer to the ground than most of the other ones they’ve been in, so she can hear a lot more than the wind. People are talking and laughing, but the sound is muted into nothing more than an echo. Distantly, she thinks she hears club music, but she cant really be sure. Neon light pours in through the one tiny window in the room, even though the thick curtains. Sydney looked out the window earlier and could see all the city life sprawling out before her up close.

“Is it the stillness?” Sydney says. She notices that Eli hardly ever rests, is always researching. She didn’t think it would be this easy to get him to comply. “Does it remind you of being dead?” she continues.

Eli begins to laugh.

_Okay, bad move_ , Sydney thinks. Anxiety swells in her stomach and rises to her throat and she’s ready to jump off her chair to find the nearest knife, but Eli doesn’t move to attack her. He just sits there. His hands have gone still and dropped into his lap, and he sort of curls in on himself, his back slouching forward and his head drooping. His body rattles with laughter, yet the sound isn’t very loud. Sydney thinks it reminds her of dead leaves in autumn, when there’s a whole bunch of them on the ground and the wind picks them up and swirls them around in a big leaf tornado. It’s like that, along with the same indescribable emotion that comes with, one that she’s never been able to tell whether its happy or sad. She doesn’t say anything else, and just listens.

Eli speaks into her silence. “Who says I want to avoid death?”

Sydney shivers.

Eli lifts his head and brings himself back to his work, his hands finding his notes and his computer keys, even in the dark. He must be using the light from his laptop and the window to see by.

“I’m close to finding Victor.”

“Really?”

Sydney pops off the chair and is halfway across the room when she remembers she doesn’t want to be near Eli, and stops.

“Is he close?” Sydney asks. “How’d you find him?”

The excitement is overwhelming, and she has to fight to keep her voice down so she doesn’t wake Mitch.

Eli nods, then clicks on a point on a map. “It wasn’t hard.”

Sydney can hardly contain her excitement. She thought getting out of bed would help her fall asleep when she went back into it, but now she knows she’s definitely not getting any sleep tonight. She’s wide awake.

—

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaaaaa I hope I did my girl justice here, i love her sm


	3. xxx

—

3 – xxx

—

They arrive at the building where Victor supposedly is—a hotel across two towns. It took them almost as many hours to get to, yet Mitch and Sydney are still bursting with anticipation. Eli trails behind them, but the feeling in his stomach is decidedly _not_ excitement.

What would it even be like, Eli thinks, to see Victor after all these years? What would he say? The last time he had been ready to kill him. He would have, too, if Sydney hadn’t put a stop to that. Eli doesn’t want to kill Victor anymore. He doesn’t think he ever really did. It was always necessity; the demon wearing Victor’s skin always wanted to kill _him_. It was self-defense, really, because even if Eli couldn’t be killed, he needed to protect his purpose and his cause. Victor wouldn’t have stolen that from him, but then again, the Victor he knew died that night at Lockland and a devil took his place. And to that, Eli was nothing.

It was a mercy to kill him. Just to put the real Victor’s memory to rest.

Still, they had not left each other on good terms, and it had been a long time since. Victor had a tendency to stew over old wounds for as long as it took him to get revenge for them. Eli had no idea how the man was going to react, and he opened his mouth to tell Mitch and Sydney he was going to wait in the hall, but closed it before he could get the words out.

All of Eli’s worries were pointless, anyhow. He realized as soon as Mitch opened the door, that Victor was gone. The room is spotless. The bed is made, the curtains are closed, and there’s not a trace that a living human stayed there. No forgotten papers or candy wrappers or lost coins behind the corners of the counter, it was like no one had stayed in it previously, even though Eli checked the hotel information and the cleaning service wasn’t supposed to come for another three hours. He would have thought Victor had never been there at all, and that he miscalculated, but for the book on the table.

It’s a time-beaten paperback filled with yellowed pages, the cover all wrinkled. Victor must have stolen it from somewhere. Sydney picks it up and flips through the pages, which Eli can see are all marked over in black sharpie. Lines drawn over with calm, casual precision. Something lazy about it, but arrogant too. Just like their time at Lockland. The thought stings and Eli drags his eyes away from the book in the young girl’s hands.

Sydney is having trouble processing the situation. She goes around to every corner of the room, into the bathroom, even the tiny storage closet that holds nothing more than a Swiffer and doesn’t have space for more. She’s running around, desperately searching, hoping, but its no use. She checks that Victor isn’t just hiding from them, that he’s still there in that room, and they could reunite and be one big happy family together again.

Eli has to hold himself back from rolling his eyes at the last thought.

He doesn’t even know what to think of when he imagines Victor as part of this family. He surely wouldn’t be one for picking up Sydney and swinging her through the air; he was much too frail and willowy and serious. Eli wonders if he cooked with them, but knew he most certainly didn’t dance. He wondered if Victor went out for ice cream with them, or watched movies together with them, all crowded together on the hotel couch. The thought of Victor sandwiched in between the giant Mitch and the little Sydney makes him laugh, and he receives a glare from Mitch in response, probably misinterpreting the laughter as him mocking Sydney’s distress.

She really is upset, and actively trying not to cry. She runs around the room once more, looking in increasingly ridiculous places, like under the bed or the couch or the coffee table. She picks up a glass cup from the bathroom and throws it at Eli’s head. He dodges it easily.

“You were supposed to find him!” she screams. “Don’t you dare betray me again!”

She curls her hands into little fists and looks like she wants to throw something at him again. He doesn’t move. There’s glass shards all along the wall behind him.

Eli doesn’t know what to say to that. “He _was_ here,” are the words that come out, dumbly.

Sydney clutches the book to her chest. She gives the room one last sad look before moving toward Mitch, who puts an arm around her shoulders. She leans into him and rests her head on his side as they make their way out of the room. She sniffles once, twice, then lifts her head up and is silent. Eli trails behind again, feeling more out of place than ever, like a wandering ghost.

—

Victor wanders.

He becomes a ghost, travelling from one place to another, leaving no trace behind to remind the world of his existence. But then, again, its no different from how he’d been living for the past five years anyway, just with less company. It’s easier without Mitch and Sydney. There’s less noise and no obligations and he lives only for himself. He only has himself to care for, and he doesn’t have to worry about others getting hurt in the crossfires of his mistakes and his ambitions.

He’s made a lot of enemies. It’s not something he’s particularly proud of, but he doesn’t mind it either. People are easy to deal with. When he wants to get rid of them, he can. When it comes to making sure those enemies don’t hurt people close to him, that’s a whole different matter. Mitch and Sydney have their own abilities and skills to protect themselves, but Victor knows they don’t deserve to be hurt.

Something deep inside him aches when he thinks about them. He finds it strange that it still exists even when he’s turned the dials of his pain all the way down to numbness. He can’t feel anything at all except for that ache, and he keeps trying to manipulate it, though nothing happens, and it irks him.

He has yet to find a way to alter the serum, so that comes first. He focuses on that as a priority, because its been two years with a moderate amount of progress, though its not going as fast as he would have liked. He hates feeling powerless when he has to take the serum to stop from exploding in a burst of electricity. It’s like something vital to him has been stripped away, leaving him hollow inside, not to mention how open it leaves him to any of the enemies he’s made. A lot of the connections he’s forged in order to make progress on the serum aren’t exactly the most legal…or forgiving. And EON is still out there. He can’t afford to get distracted.

Whatever is going on, he still finds himself trying to manipulate the feeling when he’s distracted, and doesn’t even realize he’s doing it until he becomes agitated and stops.

People don’t notice him as he passes by them in the streets. He uses his power to manipulate the subtle traces of pain in the air so that people unconsciously shy away from that sense of being uncomfortable. They would probably remember him if he stuck out more, but the weather is cold and long coats are common this time of year. The dark colors of his clothes blend in. Everything around him is subdued, lacking any of the vibrancy of rainbow leggings or multi-colored hair.

He has two vials of serum left, which is enough for research but not if he has another power burst, but he’s close now. To finding a way to stop them. He uses the vials sparingly, parsing out droplets to test after he’s broken into several research labs. Those have all the chemicals and equipment he needs, but it’s always such a pain (no pun intended) to knock out every single guard with his power along the way.

He’s stolen all the files he can on EO’s, and there’s not many. Haverty did the most direct research on them out of anyone. If Victor can thank Eli for anything, it would be that. It bought him more time, in any case.

But time is running out. He can stop the bursts of power that build up inside of him before he explodes completely, and it’s a lot easier to deal with now that he has no one to worry about accidentally killing. But he doesn’t want to use the last two vials. He saves them as his only chances, and it makes him anxious how little there is left compared to when he started.

He finds himself wondering what exactly is motivating him to work so hard for this.

He doesn’t know why he wants to find a way to fix the way he is in the first place. An innate desire to survive? He’s never been scared of death, not the first time when he became an EO, nor the second, when Eli carved the life out of him in that fight to the death where only one of them was ever likely to come out of alive. The subsequent deaths where he’s exploded in a burst of electric power have been inconvenient, short but frequent, and increasingly longer. He doesn’t want to become some braindead zombie with how much damage being dead for too long could do to someone like him, but that’s just avoidance of an unpleasant outcome. He’s not _afraid_.

So he finds it interesting how adamant he is about this. He keeps going like something is propelling him forward to find a cure for his…brokenness. He doesn’t want to give up his power—he would never. He’s close to finding a way to alter the serum so he can keep both his power and his life, a way to stabilize it without neutralizing it.

It’s been a long time of this. Running from hotel to hotel—he just left one not too long ago. Breaking into research labs. Finding black market dealers for certain compounds that _don’t_ come stocked in research labs.

Victor is in a research lab the first time he sees _him_.

He broke in about an hour ago and is working quickly, because those he forced into unconsciousness will be waking up soon and they would know where to find him. He’s not exactly being subtle, standing out in the open in the main hub of the laboratory. The walls are painted white and shine under the glare of fluorescent lights, so he sticks out even more in his long black coat. He takes some chemicals from a glass shelf and turns around to find Eli sitting on a work bench. He looks just as he did in Lockland: young, bright-eyed, and not dead.

Victor nearly drops the flasks he’s holding.

“What are you doing here?” Victor asks.

It’s illogical, talking to a phantom, because that’s what Eli is. He’s dead. Has been for two years. The boy everyone thought was forever, who couldn’t be harmed by anything—not weapons, nor EO powers, even Marcella’s corrupted rot. Victor always thought he’d been invincible, better at everything and too arrogant to ever succumb to something as banal as mortality.

But he had died in the end, and the world moved on. Only Victor hadn’t.

“I thought I’d come visit you,” Eli says.

But it wasn’t Eli. It was just Victor’s imagination, nothing more. He didn’t look like he’d been touched by death at all, whereas Victor always came back a little more haggard and pale each time. He might have been a tad bitter about that, but wasn’t about to admit it to the phantom. Eli being inside his head, could hear his thoughts. He smirks down at Victor, every bit as mischievous and malevolent as before.

“Go away,” Victor says.

Eli tilts his head to the side. “Aren’t you happy to see me?” he says, feigning hurt. “You sought me out for so long.”

“And now you’re dead.”

Eli steps down from the bench. “Ah, but so are you.”

He moves toward Victor, trailing a finger over the pristine white of the lab tables, weaving a circuitous route in between them. He smiles at Victor, but not directly, and he’s reminded of those brief moments at Lockland where he would see the true Eli Cardale. The monster just beneath the skin.

“At least, close enough to it,” Eli says.

Victor knows he should ignore him. He was just a figment of his imagination. How he was there at all was an issue itself; maybe Victor’s mind was finally tired of his constant deaths and reawakening’s so that it was finally beginning to shut down. Even more reason that he needed to focus. On top of that, the lab techs were going to wake up and call security at some point, and Victor needed this serum. He goes back to work, grabbing solutions from cabinets and analyzing them in expensive machines.

“Do you miss me?” Eli whispers.

He’s right behind now. Victor can practically feel him there; he almost feels real. He tries to ignore him.

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> its ya boi Victor


	4. Eli

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Eli causes problems for everybody, but then again, when doesn't he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: this is the chapter where those self-harm tags apply, along with some heavy dissociation. Be safe everybody!

—

4 – Eli

_You smile at the moon even though it's haunting you_  
_You wonder if it ever feels as lonely as you do_  
 _Your nose is always bleeding but it's fine 'cause it looks pretty_  
 _It doesn't scare you like it did before the angel city_

—

The atmosphere in the hotel room is back to its usual state of faith, determination, and hope. All that’s missing now is the pixie dust.

It’s early in the morning now, with the sun just beginning to peek through the spaces in between buildings. There are birds on the windowsill outside, while others are flying just out of reach. They hop from one window to the next, to the edge of a roof, to an unlit streetlight, unconcerned with the people below going off to work. The noise of taxi’s and aggravated late workers isn’t present in a hotel room this high up, but the sound of the birds is right outside and Eli can’t stand it. They’ve been chirping for hours, much like the other two residents he lives with, who have also been up since before the sun.

Mitch is cooking breakfast—bacon and eggs—while Sydney scribbles on a newspaper in purple crayon, absolutely focused. She’s humming a made-up tune that switches tempo every few seconds, but Mitch still taps his foot to it all the same. They’re both excited and happy and absolutely nauseating.

The cause for all this celebration is because today they’re going to check out a new lead on Victor’s whereabouts. An eye-witness that Mitch discovered, which is a better source of information than anything Eli has found so far. The thought irks him. He’s been scouring the internet, the CCTV, and all of the available files they have for weeks, and Mitch just happens to find a better source by striking up a conversation with a random woman in the produce aisle of the grocery mart.

“Ah, yes, splendid detective work,” he remarked bitterly when Mitch came back to tell him and Sydney.

The two of them had ignored him as usual, and that was just as well. He didn’t have time to spare in meaningless conversations anyway, not when he had to find more information and more sources. He had been working night and day anyway, but it seems he needed to double his efforts. Victor wasn’t going to let himself be found so easily, not if he didn’t want to be. People who had seen him were likely not to pay much attention, and a lot less likely to be left alive if they did. Eli should have known this wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing was ever easy when it came to him.

The three of them pile into the car and drive to a modest neighborhood not too far away. It’s a reddish-tan-colored apartment complex; not an especially nice one, but it’s in a fairly good neighborhood, and doesn’t have junkies hanging out in the lower courtyard, so it’s good enough. They come to an equally non-outstanding apartment on the 14th floor, and mitch knocks at the door. Eli hangs back, looking out of a hallway window at the rest of the district that he could see from there, even when it looked pretty much the same as any other cityscape he could see from any other hotel they’ve been in. They sky is grey, and Eli can tell its about to rain.

A short woman with black hair opens the door and smiles at the big man in front of her, throwing out her arms to hug him even though they’ve only met one time, very recently. It’s not the reaction most people have to meeting Mitch, and he seems a little surprised by it and takes a step back, though the woman doesn’t notice because she’s already moved on to Sydney. She takes the girl into her arms and invites them inside, saying something about drinks before her voice fades as she disappears into the apartment. The rest are a bit more hesitant, though Eli can see the bewilderment on both Mitch and Sydney’s faces.

The two of them sit down on the couch, while Eli goes behind it. Mitch cranes his neck to see what he’s doing, and if he’s doing anything he _shouldn’t_ be, but when he sees Eli just standing there like an idiot, he leaves him alone.

There are lots of useless items on the back wall of this woman’s apartment, Eli notes. Posters from different bands, keychains and other tourist kitsch and assorted photo frames. A little statue of the Eiffel tower. A cheap metal ornament of a double-decker bus. There is _a lot_. He finds himself staring at it all, even when none of it will help him find Victor, find peace, but he keeps looking anyway. This woman must have travelled most of the world by now with everything she’s collected.

Mitch is asking her some questions, yet she doesn’t seem to want to answer them. She’s dodging and misdirecting, or at least trying to, because she’s not very good at it at all, which leads to her making a lot of ‘um’ sounds instead. Mitch isn’t any better at getting her to open up, and Sydney isn’t experienced with interviewing. Eli wants to find satisfaction in the fact that Mitch’s source didn’t work out as well as he thought, but he just doesn’t have the energy to. They’re not any closer to finding Victor. He just feels hollow.

His back is turned to them, and has been this whole time, while he’s been looking at all the things on the back table and wall. There’s a photo in a little wooden frame with the woman in it, standing next to a man who has his arm around her shoulders. He’s startlingly familiar. Eli picks up the frame and looks closely at it, and it’s only after the second time the woman has said to put it down does he hear her.

He sets the fragile picture down and turns around to face her. Her eyes go wide with fear.

“You!” she screams.

That fear morphs into rage in an instant and she lunges at Eli, which he thinks is incredibly stupid. She’s unarmed, he cant be hurt, and she has nothing but her bare hands and a whole lot of anger.

“You’re the one!”

He stands completely still as she swats at him, her sharp nails slicing through the skin of his cheek. He could push her away, throw her to the ground. He’s half a foot taller than her. It would be easy. Hot blood wells from the cuts and spills down the side of his face and neck, and the woman tries again to make more. Sydney and Mitch jump up from their seats, yet Eli doesn’t move.

“He was my boyfriend!” the woman shouts, but the words are closer to sobs than anything else. “We were planning a life together!” Tears spill down her cheeks and ruin her mascara.

Eli is already healing, though it’s a lot slower than he used to. He figures that must be the downside from being brought back by Sydney—tearing him away from fate once again, where he must have left any remaining part of his soul behind in that peaceful oblivion. There had to be some price to pay for that, as if he hadn’t paid enough for his mistake already. He supposes this isn’t such a bad outcome, though, considering all that happened to Victor. It could have been a lot worse.

“You killed him!” the woman screams in his face.

She’s crying freely now, and Eli hopes none of it gets on him. She keeps trying to scratch him and punch him, swinging blindly. It’s ridiculous. She barely does any damage other than a few scratches, which heal easily enough even with the increase in time. He figures he should test out the exact time it takes now, before he comes up against a real opponent that could actually be a problem.

“You’re one of them,” she says, noticing his rapid healing. 

Eli says nothing. Mitch nods his head toward the door, which him and Sydney are already moving toward. Sydney has her arms crossed and her head down, but Eli can tell by the tenseness of her stance that she isn’t pleased. The black-haired woman slaps Eli and his head snaps to the side. He’s beginning to get real annoyed.

“Why would you kill him?” she asks in a quivering voice. “Why? Tell me the reason.”

“Self-loathing, mostly,” chimes in Sydney, before Eli can say anything.

She’s at the doorway, leaning back against it, and her eyes are like cut glass when she looks at him. Mitch makes a discomforted face and gestures for Eli to come with him, so he finally moves to follow. The woman is screaming behind them, but she doesn’t come after them. Whether she’s confident in the police’s ability to catch him, or too afraid to confront her boyfriend’s killer outside of the imagined safety of her home, it doesn’t matter to Eli.

“EON will be after us now,” he says.

Mitch shakes his head. “I can alter any police report she makes. We’ll have to move again, but nothing will make it back to EON.”

The hallway falls to silence again. Eli thought he would have enjoyed the quiet after all that incessant screaming, but it isn’t as comfortable as he had hoped. Neither of them look at him, and just stare straight ahead. That is, until Sydney glares over her shoulder.

“We could have gotten to her to talk! We almost had it!” she yells at him. She’s red-faced and puffy-cheeked but still shouting. “This was our best chance at finding Victor!”

“So was the last place we checked,” Eli says non-committally. He’s looking out the window again and it is, indeed, raining. Just as he thought.

Sydney lets out a noise of frustration and throws her arms down at her sides. Maybe she’ll stomp her feet too if he waits long enough. She’s balled her hands into little fists and looks like she wants to hit him, but knows it would be a waste of time. It would lead to more humiliation on her part than it would end up actually hurting him. Nothing can hurt him.

“Why do you always have to ruin everything!” she yells at him.

Eli doesn’t know.

—

He sits on the floor of the bathroom with a knife in his hand. His other arm is resting on his knee with the sleeve pulled back, and he cuts the skin from elbow to wrist, watching the blood rise up and spill over. It’s hot at first, but he feels it cool quickly enough as it trails down his arm and drips onto the floor.

He observes how long it takes for the skin to knit back together, which isn’t instantaneous like it used to be. That could be a problem, but also, he doesn’t really care. He brushes his hand over the place where the wound used to be, and there’s nothing but blood and no source. He slices the skin once again, waits for it to heal. He counts the seconds. It doesn’t take very many.  

The world is far away. He’s underwater again, in that ice-cold bathtub, and there’s no sound. No anything. Everything is muted, and his eyes are unfocused, his mind is slow. Mitch and Sydney are talking about something in the kitchen, but he cant make out what they’re saying. He’s pretty sure they mentioned his name, so they must be talking about him, which makes sense when he’s the one who ruined their chance, the one with the most potential to kill them or betray them or lead them astray even when he wants the same thing they do and he has no reason to do any of those things not when Victor has the serum that can free him and he needs it he needs it he needs it—

He leans over the sink and cuts his wrists until he has an exact amount of time for them to heal. He feels that’s somehow important, but he doesn’t feel much of anything at the moment.

He watches the blood drip onto the porcelain, and the contrast between bright red and white is striking. He stays like that for a long time. He looks up at the mirror and sees himself staring back, but his face is all hollowed out and exhausted in way that his healing power won’t ever be able to fix. He still looks young and spry and healthy, but it’s an illusion, a trick of the light and some bad decisions made years ago. He grips the edge of the sink. It’s the only thing keeping him from falling.

There’s banging at the door, urgent. It’s not a polite knock.

“Eli, open up! I need to take a shower!” Sydney yells. The banging stops.

Eli looks down and there’s blood in the sink. It’s all over his arms and hands and staining the edges of his sleeves and the white of the porcelain sink. He notices the blood all over the room, eyes widening and focusing like he’s seeing it for the first time. He didn’t realize he spilled so much. Sydney and Mitch are going to be mad. He washes off his arms in the sink so he doesn’t track more blood around the place, then sets the knife down on the sink and leaves.

Sydney is waiting a few feet down the hall so she wouldn’t bump into him on his way out, but he doesn’t even look at her. He makes his way back to the living room where his work is, while she slips into the bathroom. Eli can hear her make a choked noise of surprise, like a cut-off scream.

Mitch punches him for scaring her and Eli can’t help the laughter that bubbles to his lips. The big man yells at him for not taking this seriously, but he really can’t stop. He didn’t mean to scare the girl, but it’s so _stupid_ how Mitch resorts to punching him when there are more effective ways of hurting him, given his power. He’s not even bleeding yet.

“Come on, Syd. Let’s go.”

Mitch turns away from him and puts a hand on Sydney’s shoulder, leading her away from Eli, who still has his hands around his midsection to stifle the laughter.

—


	5. Sydney

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Sydney and Eli do not get along.

—

5 – Sydney

—

“I don’t see how you’ve managed to survive this long when you’re so violently self-destructive,” Sydney says.

They’re in a different hotel room, one closer to their next source of information. It’s right across the street from a police station, which is quite ironic, really, and she has to admire the audacity. It’s pretty risky, but Mitch’s skills—and, arguably, Eli’s—are highly useful at covering up their presence and identities. It’s also easier to tap into their radio frequencies and get the first responses of any “unexplained electrical occurrences” that might be happening around town.

Sydney is at the breakfast bar, which comes adorned with garishly red painted seats coated in some kind of shiny (and slippery) resin. The whole kitchen is on a raised platform so that the rest of the room is a little bit lower, which includes Eli’s workstation. She hates the seats because she can’t spin in them, and she feels like she’s going to slip off every time she sits down or shifts even an inch, but she likes the feeling of being a little higher than him. She gathers all her news articles and colored pens on the long table and always chooses that place to sit because she feels it gives her some form of power over him, even when it really doesn’t. He could snap her neck in an instant, if he wanted to.

But he hasn’t.

She tries to calculate the likelihood of this being some elaborate long-con, of getting her and Mitch to trust him so he can strike when they least expect it. Knowing Victor, and how long he can keep a grudge, she guesses it’s not impossible, but it’s also not very likely. Eli has nothing to gain from them except Victor and his serum, and what Eli wants with it—peace or _whatever_.

She doesn’t like to think about his obvious desire for death. Despite having the power she does, she doesn’t like to think about death at all. She likes renewal, and life, and the revival of things once considered lost and out of reach. Death isn’t final for her, but with the way Eli talks about it…it makes her shiver. He’s so _insistent_. Like it’s a drug for him. One hit and he’s addicted for life, and he’ll do anything to have more. That’s the opposite of what she stands for.

Plus, if Eli wanted to kill them, he would have done it already. Sydney doesn’t like to think about that either, the possibilities of what could happen, but those thoughts are harder to drive away. It should give her comfort, she thinks, that he probably wouldn’t hurt her and Mitch, but it doesn’t. _Probably_ is weak, and statistics are stupid.

And, most of all, Eli isn’t Victor.

“Technically, I haven’t,” Eli responds. “You would know.”

Ah, yes. She _did_ kill him. Sydney wondered if he had any lingering feelings of resentment toward her for that, but she could never tell what he was thinking just from his face alone. He displayed absolutely nothing, but she could see in his eyes that there was a cleverness just behind them, a mind whirring away with problems and solutions and plans. He was smart, Sydney had to give him that, but there was nothing she could decipher from him, not in all the time they had been living together.

She could read Victor.

He liked to think he was invulnerable, but Sydney had known him long enough to be able to pick out which of his mannerisms meant which emotion. Whether he was angry, which was often and apparent enough, or the subtler things, the weakness he didn’t like to have on display. She could tell he was exhausted and desperate, and when he was deliberately trying to hide it from her. She knew him.

Eli isn’t like that.

“Are you angry at me?” she asks, because she wants to know the truth.

“No,” he says laconically. Sydney finds this curious. “I’m more angry that you brought me back,” he adds.

“Why?” She rubs her upper arms. It’s too cold this time of year. “Why do you want to go back?”

Eli doesn’t look at her. He just looks down at his hands resting in his lap, and is quiet for a moment before he speaks.

“Because its peaceful,” he says. “Nothing hurts.”

Sydney considers this, yet she doesn’t know what to make of it no matter how much she thinks about what it could mean. He has a power where he _literally cannot be hurt_. Well, he _can_ , but it’s a few seconds at best and surely that’s a lot better than death. She knows what it’s like being seriously injured, and how long it takes to heal. He was the one who shot her in the first place. He should be grateful to have a power that takes away any injury in almost no time at all, without having to deal with cleaning the wound and rebandaging it and worrying about scars.

(Although, she quite likes her scar. It’s a good reminder.)

Sydney looks at him quizzically, squinting her eyes. He’s still poring away at those police files and records, always searching. She just doesn’t understand how he could be so determined to go back to being dead when it’s so terrifying.

She remembers falling into the lake and having the realization that she was going to die there. That she would never get to experience anything in the world ever again; she would never hear another laugh or cry, never see another bright sky or sunset or even a snowflake. She doesn’t remember the brief moment before she woke up, but she knows she wouldn’t want to be lost to nothingness. She wants to know things, and to feel things, to have experiences and excitement and everything the world could offer.

What could be so horrible that Eli would chose oblivion over all of that?

—

Sydney still has nightmares about him.

She’s back on that lake again, just as all her old nightmares from before. That lake where she died, so cold and silent. And he’s always there with her.

Eli’s eyes glitter with something that could be mistaken as mischief, but Sydney always saw it for what it was—malice. He’s a hornets’ nest of hatred. All that evil simmering just under the skin, wanting to get out. He steps toward her. His hands are behind his back, casual, calm. There’s a languid smile working its way across his face.

Sydney feels her heart beat fast in her chest.

She never knows she’s dreaming while she’s having a nightmare. No matter how many times she has them, it’s always the same. Eli takes away everyone she loves, and he makes her watch. Then he comes for her too.

She thought finally killing him would put a stop to the nightmares, and it did, for a while. But fear is a persistent thing. It always scared her that he was just…there. In EON’s morgue. She used to worry his body could have awoken because who knew the full extent of his power, and yet, it had been her own doing that brought him back into this world.

It definitely didn’t help her fears that he was not only in her nightmares, but in the room as well. He’s not something she could just wake up from anymore.

She falls asleep on the couch in the living area while her and Mitch are watching a movie. She wakes a little later when Mitch shakes her, and sees Eli at his desk. In her confusion, she thinks she’s back on the lake with him, still in the nightmare without any chance of escape. She screams and backs away until she nearly falls off the couch, but Eli just smiles.

“Did you dream about me?”

He asks her this with a completely level voice, but it sounds mocking to her. Mitch snarls at him and puts his hands on Sydney’s arms, whispering “you’re okay, you’re okay, he’s not going to hurt you,” until she stops hyperventilating. Sydney hates that she cried in front of Eli, but at the time, she was only thinking about how she didn’t want to die there. She made the mistake of looking back, and saw Eli’s eyes following her wherever she went. His face showed nothing at all, but Sydney could feel the violence in it.

—

Sydney stands out on the balcony, feeling the harsh winds wrap around her. Mitch made her a hot chocolate to calm her nerves, but its still too hot and she’s too impatient to wait. She tells herself she came out here so the wind could blow the steam off her drink so she didn’t have to, and it would cool down faster, which is logical but ultimately not her real motivation. She doesn’t want to admit it to herself, but she came out here because it’s something Victor would do.

He was always brooding on the balcony whenever the hotel rooms came with one, and it never mattered whether it was freezing or raining. He stood with his back turned to the room, over-looking the city and his long black coat flapped in the wind, much like the steam trails on Sydney’s cocoa were doing right now. They blow back in her face, leaving it damp. She wipes at it with the back of her hand and sighs.

She knows Victor probably didn’t even feel the cold, but it concerned her, nonetheless. He likes to believe he’s invincible—he never said it outright, but she could tell by his actions that he did—but he’s still just as mortal as everyone else. She worries about him, and always tried to get him to come back inside before he caught a cold. She wants to believe he’s invincible too. Sometimes she catches herself wanting him to always be there to protect her, but she knows that’s not realistic. She has to look after herself, and him too, if the encounter with Eli two years ago is anything to go by.

_Eli Cardale_. The man who really is invincible…mostly.

Sydney’s hands tighten around the base of her mug. The heat of it stings her palms, but she doesn’t loosen her grip and only glares at out nothing. She hears the door open. It’s probably Mitch, here to tell her to come inside even though it really isn’t that cold, and she _had_ put on a jacket like he’d insisted.

“You should come inside.”

The words she expected, the person saying them she did not. Sydney spins around so quickly she loses her grip on the mug, but Eli darts forward and catches it in one hand. He’s looking up at her and not at the scalding liquid splashed across his wrist. Doesn’t even flinch. Just a tiny, imperceptible quirk of the lips that looks more like amusement than pain, and it sparks a burning hatred within Sydney that almost outweighs her fear.

Almost.

She’s on a balcony, very high up. Alone. With Eli.

“Careful,” he says, setting the mug on the railing. “Wouldn’t want anything to fall.”

Sydney gulps. “Is that a threat?”

Eli puts his hands up like he’s under arrest, though that stupid half-smirking expression doesn’t leave his face. “It’s not in my best interests to harm you.”

Sydney shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She feels her attention being drawn in a million different directions, from the bird cawing on the adjacent roof, to the person two floors above leaning out her window. Sydney wonders if that woman would see it if Eli were to push her to her death, though she definitely wouldn’t be able to save her.

“It was a few years ago.”

Eli’s eyes shutter and he looks away, breaking their undeclared staring contest. The smirk is gone and his face looks so hollow, Sydney has to wonder if it had ever been there at all. He leans forward onto the railing, crossing his arms and letting his wrists hang over the edge. One still drips hot cocoa, though there’s no redness of a burn. Of course, there wouldn’t be.

“I was a twelve year old girl. I was a child,” Sydney says. “Were you really willing to go so far for your own self-righteousness?”

Eli’s eyes shoot toward her, affronted. “It’s not—” He takes a breath. “EO’s have no souls, so I had to—”

“Had to _what_ , Eli?” Sydney snaps. She throws an arm out in the direction of the city, hoping that conveys her idea of the world around them. “Kill all the evil in the world? Restore balance? Justice?”

She doesn’t understand how he could just stand there with that perplexed expression, as if nothing she was saying made any sense yet everything he’d done always did. How he could be so utterly certain in his own rightness, she just couldn’t comprehend.

She snorts with derision. “Who made you God?”

“That’s—” Eli begins to say, but Sydney’s about to let him go off on a religious tirade about how everyone else is wrong except for him.

“I’m not finished!” she shouts. Eli still looks affronted, but a little more cowed. Sydney takes satisfaction in that, at least. “You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies, or who you deem worthy or not. You don’t get to decide that!”

Eli flinches. He opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, but doesn’t. It takes a moment for Sydney to realize she’d drawn closer to him while talking, and hadn’t even noticed how much. Not a good idea. it wasn’t a good idea to piss him off either, which is definitely what was happening right now, but she couldn’t stop herself. He needed someone to tell him he was wrong and delusional and didn’t know what he was talking about—but of course, everyone who’d ever gotten close ended up dead.

Sydney takes a step back. Eli takes an unsteady breath.

“I—I,” Eli stammers.

“What?” Sydney snapped, cutting him off.

She leans back against the sliding doors to the hotel room, because there was no way she’s getting close to the edge of the balcony with Eli right there. She crosses her arms and watches crows dive down from the top of a streetlight. It’s silent but for the wind, less of a whisper and more of a foreboding howl. She really should just go inside. Leave Eli to his stupidity.

“I don’t feel like I’m missing my soul...” she trails off.

Eli fiddles with the cuff of his jacket, pulling at loose strings. “I do.” He doesn’t look at her, but instead hangs his head, slumping over the edge of the railing. “And I’ve met others.”

“EO’s who abuse their powers?” 

“We’re not innocent.”

Sydney raises a brow. “Oh? So you’re including yourself in that description?” Eli nods solemnly. “What are these other evil EO’s you’ve met?” Sydney continues.

“Victor, for one,” Eli says. Sydney feels anger spike within her, but she also notices how anger wasn’t present in Eli’s voice when he said that. He sounded…defeated. “And your sister.”

“Don’t talk about things you don’t understand!” She screams at him.

How dare he look down on her sister. Sydney knows Serena wasn’t perfect, hadn’t been the best person, but she was all Sydney ever had growing up. She doesn’t want the memory damaged by this monster she’d sided with.

“Don’t understand? I was with her for a year!” Eli says, his voice raising in volume but not enough to be considered shouting. Yet.

Sydney could have laughed. “I was with her my whole life, Eli!” His arrogance is too much. Did he really think he knew _her_ sister better than her?

“And in all that time, you must have noticed there was something not right about her.”

His voice had gone back to normal. He leans back against the railing, propping his elbows up on it and looking far too casual for the subject matter of their conversation. Sydney hates it. She hates him, and how none of this seems to affect him. She wants him to hurt, to be hurt, and for her words to bother him as much as his bother her. She’s practically livid, but resists the urge to squeeze her hands into fists. She would not play to the role of ‘child having a tantrum’ and give him the satisfaction of watching.

“You know nothing,” she says, and her voice was perfectly controlled, absolutely level, without a trace of anger. She hopes.

Eli looks to the side, and his eyes became dark and faraway, like he’s remembering something she can’t see. “I was under her control, I knew she was capable of dangerous things.”

“Under her control?” Sydney questions. “She was helping you!”

Eli’s hands tightened on the railing. His body stiffens, and Sydney realizes the casual expressions he displayed were all fake. Everything about him is fake, an imitation, a copy gone wrong. It meant that this was getting to him, which was good news.

It also means he’s more likely to try and hurt her, which is bad.

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t—” Eli draws in a sharp intake of breath, cutting his own words off. He rubs a hand over his face and swallows, looking to the side. “…nevermind.”

“What—” Sydney begins to say, when she hears the door open behind her.

This time it really is Mitch, and he does not look pleased.

Sydney doesn’t even get to say hello before he lunges at Eli, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and pushing him back. Eli’s back curves over the railing before he begins to slide backwards. His eyes go wide and his hands grasp for the railing to hold onto, but he’s too far out over to the side to reach. He doesn’t slide any further, as Mitch holds on, using his strength and large form to his advantage.

“What were you doing out here with Sydney?” Mitch shouts at him.

Eli’s arms wave wildly in the air and his chest stutters with unsteady breaths. “I didn’t—I just—”

They were three floors from the top of the building. He’d probably break every bone in his body if he fell from this height.

If only for a moment.

Mitch looks over his shoulder at Sydney. “Did he hurt you?”

Sydney shakes her head. Her eyes go to her empty hot chocolate mug, abandoned on the side of the railing. “He made me spill my cocoa, though.”

Mitch looks down at Eli, halfway over the edge and staring up at him with panic. He pulls Eli back onto the balcony and throws him to the ground, where he gets on hands and knees and stays like that, out of breath.

Mitch sighs. “I’ll make you another one,” he says to Sydney as they head inside.

—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's an extra long chapter for my readers! all two of you. even though nothing really happens lol I just like it when people call Eli out on things he Does Not Want to Talk About.


	6. Eli

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Eli fits this meme:  
> someone: if you keep ignoring your emotions like this, you will eventually break down  
> Eli: how unfortunate

—

6 – Eli

_Do you ever feel like you completely?_  
_You're so quiet, eyes look tired_  
 _You look like you're barely alive_  
 _You're unreal, I can feel_

—

They have to talk to someone at, of all places, a church.

The three of them walk in with the same purpose, but their eyes are all directed to different things. Sydney is grounded, always focused, keeping her eyes forward and toward the pulpit at the end of the aisle, while Eli can sense her attention shifting to the sides scanning for movement at the same time. Mitch’s eyes are skyward, but not out of a religious sense. Just the architecture, Eli can tell, by the ‘o’ shape the man’s mouth forms, probably without him realizing. Eli looks up too, and the mural on the ceiling is beautiful, depicting a perfect representation of one of the scriptures he remembers well from his youth. But his eyes don’t linger too long on it, or drift like Mitch’s, or scan for movement and activity like Sydney’s.

He watches the metal cross in the center of the room, driven straight down into the cold stone floor. It’s like the Earth shattered beneath it as it was thrown into this place, now balanced perfectly and glinting in the light. It’s violent, violent, _violent_ —

It reminds him of home.

Mitch and Sydney veer off to the side once they catch sight of who they came here to talk to, but Eli keeps on going straight. He walks down the center of the aisle toward the cross, his feet carrying him mechanically across the carpet.

Mitch hisses to him, “Hey, where are you going?”

But Eli ignores him. When it’s clear he’s not going to run off on a killing spree, or when more important matters require their attention, Mitch and Sydney let him go. He doesn’t think he could stop if he wanted to.

He walks up to the silver cross and puts his hands on the horizontal bar, arcing his back up and putting his head down, just as his father instructed him to do. He breathes raggedly, and his hands shake on the cross. The metal is almost unbearably cold.

He’s brought back to memories of his childhood, though he was a lot shorter then and had to reach up over his head just to put part of his fingers over the bar. Now he has to lean down, and is mainly keeping himself upright by putting his weight into his hands on that bar. His fingers curl from how hard he’s holding it.

He bows his head so it’s touching the center bar, and he thinks of Heaven. He remembers being dead. He honestly doesn’t know if he was in Heaven or not—everything was just darkness and silence. But it was so peaceful, more peaceful than an entire decade of murdering EO’s, watching as the life fled from their eyes and the lights went out. More peaceful than anything he’s ever experienced, and he’s desperate for it again because he’s never been happier than while he was dead. He guesses that means he was in Heaven, even if there weren’t any of the things he thought there were going to be.

Ah, if only his father could see him now. Disregarding everything he ever taught him.

“Are you lost, my son?”

Eli gasps.

The voice is nothing like Pastor Cardale’s, not even close, so it’s a dumb thing for him to be so surprised and he feels foolish and ashamed of his reaction. His heart still beats in rapid staccato, regardless.

When Eli opens his eyes, there’s a priest standing next to him with a grey-white beard and deep-set amber eyes. He’s reaching a hand out to him and Eli flinches on instinct, and the priest retracts his hand. Eli feels like he could die right there. The bearded man doesn’t even look like his father, but the words ‘my son’ caught him off guard. He blames the situation, and its similarity.

He doesn’t answer the priest, with those eyes full of pity, and flees down the center aisle and toward the front doors. Mitch shouts at him to stop, but he doesn’t, and just keeps going until he’s flung open the doors and gotten out of that building. Mitch and Sydney run after him and ask all sorts of questions, but never the right ones.

Eli wouldn’t know how to answer even if they did.

—

He goes back to the church that night.

It’s midnight when he leaves the hotel room, both Mitch and Sydney fast asleep in the only two beds in the room. (There’s always only two, and the hotel staff offer to bring Eli a cot, but he declines. He doesn’t need to sleep, anyway.)

The pair think they’ve been doing a good job of keeping an eye on him. Watching his every move. Making sure he doesn’t escape.

Eli lets them think so, even when they clearly aren’t as good at surveillance as they might’ve hoped. He could have escaped whenever he wanted, but the thing keeping him with them is that he doesn’t want to leave. He needs to help them so he can get the reward at the end—to be at peace at last, once again.

Still, he finds himself drawn to that church again, with its violent metal cross.

He enters the overly large front doors and is glad to find no one there, or at least no one visible. He doesn’t want anyone to see him right now, even though he’s probably being watched by eyes in every direction, hiding in the shadows. That’s what it always felt like, anyway. The hundred eyes bound to latch onto every misstep, every crack in his persona.* And Eli really didn’t have the energy right now not to show any cracks when he was already falling apart.

He curls his fingers around the horizontal bar of the cross, just his father taught him, and waits.

Everything is silent around him.

The wind howls outside, and the stained-glass windows were battered by the rain, but it’s distant and muted by the space of the building, or the noise inside his head. He watches the raindrops fall from his hair and onto the metal for a few moments, and the way the light reflects off them which glitters in a way that’s almost pretty, if only Eli could stop seeing them as red as blood.

He’s nine years old again, and his father is shouting something at him. He thinks it’s the word ‘repent’ and he tries to obey.

He’s a little older now, and taller, and still thinks he deserves it. He thinks of this as some kind of cleansing, or penance, for being unworthy. Unholy. Evil. He tries so hard to be better, but nothing ever gets better.  

He’s twelve now, with thirty-two scars on his back. He has the wings of an angel, and he’s standing over a dead body at the bottom of the stairs.

He closes his eyes and sees Patrick and Lisa smiling at him, but he can’t keep the image in his mind. It fades too quickly. Other faces take its place—his mother, floating in pink water in a white dress, her arms slit from wrist to elbow, just like he tried to do over and over and over until it was finally enough but it never was. There’s Angie, and she has a warm smile, then Serena, and her smile is cold. He shivers.

There’s his old girlfriend, Charlotte, who he only ever dated because it made him fit the role of normal teenage boy, but he forgot her just as quick. There’s Stell, of all people, with his stern face probably locked in that expression with a crease between his brows until the day he died. And then Haverty. Eli shivers again. It’s not from the rain he’s soaked with.

He sees Victor, but it’s the sun-lit Victor from Lockland who liked to sit on the outer stone walls while he blacked out words in his parents’ flaky self-help books. It’s the Victor that’s all tall and lanky with enough arrogance to fill every square inch of himself, the very person who had the intelligence, insight, and ability to rival Eli for the top spot in Lockland’s grading system. The only person that could ever keep up with him. The only person who looked at him and saw _him_ , through every single mask and charade Eli could put on to cover his true thoughts. The only one who ever understood him. It is not the Victor that came back wrong, the Victor that came after him in the dark with a metal knife and a detached grin.

He opens his eyes and watches the rain drip onto the metal once more, only it’s not rain, and he’s crying for the first time in over fifteen years.

Suddenly, his knees give out and he crashes to the floor in front of the cross and he’s squeezing his eyes shut but tears keep falling. He presses his forehead to the metal and wraps his hands around the base of it, and everything feels so heavy. The weight of everything that’s ever happened in his life comes crashing down upon his shoulders and he can’t hold it up any longer. He hopes no one is watching even though they probably are, he hopes no one comes to ask if he’s okay because it’s the last thing he needs, he doesn’t want anyone to see, he doesn’t want anyone to speak to him—

He breaks.

He folds further into himself, his arms curling around his chest and his body pressing into the cross that he hopes would somehow impart comfort into him even when all it can give him is cold. It echoes in mind, in his soul, if he even still has one after two deaths. He sobs, gasping, hitching breaths, but never makes a sound. Old habits, and all that.

He stays like that for a long time, or at least it feels like it, but he doesn’t really know. When he’s finally gotten past wanting to scream, he says only one thing, yet it comes out as a broken whisper.

“Please…save me.”

It’s little more than begging, and it disgusts him.

He gets up, turns around, swipes at his eyes, and begins walking down the center aisle, composed mask already falling back into place. He hears shuffling to the side but doesn’t see anyone, and he’s glad of it because he feels like he would have murdered them on the spot if he had.

He never goes back to the church again. He considers burning it down, just to get rid of the memories. It doesn’t help to erase his failure.

—

_* means that’s a line from the book (Vengeful 179)._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this story is getting progressively more emo lmao but this was my favorite chapter to write. Does that make me evil? Eh, doesn't matter, everyone in this series is. Haha.


	7. xxx

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which everything comes together

—

7 – xxx

—

For anyone else, a shady situation like this would be a problem. Victor walks down a set of exceedingly dark stairs that creak underfoot, made of old wood ready to give way at any moment. That alone should have been enough to give anyone pause, without the added fact that Victor doesn’t know where these stairs lead. They begin at the back of building in the seedier part of town, there are two guys with guns at his back that are going down with him, and everything is shrouded in darkness. But he’s not just anyone, and he’s not worried. He can drop them in seconds.

That’s what he ends up doing anyway, even when their gang leader gives Victor everything he needs. Illegal drugs, and substances he can’t get anywhere else. He takes a few extras too, just in case he needs something different for his new version of the serum. He’s almost finished with it, but he has to admit it’s been a little hard to do complex and innovative scientific research when he keeps having to break into a different lab every other day while also covering his tracks. Makes it hard to go too in-depth. And he has a little bit more on his mind than keeping track of notes.

He looks around once at the bodies of various goons draped over the backs of their chairs, and thinks he probably should not have used his power as much as he did.

“You’re right about that one,” Not-Eli says, in response to his thoughts.

Victor sighs and tilts his head back. Pinches the bridge of his nose. He wishes Eli would leave him alone just for a single moment of peace.

“Can’t use it too often like that. How close are you to—” Eli makes a bursting motion with his hands and an explosion noise. “…ya know.”

Victor doesn’t answer, just steps over bodies on his way to the stairs, going back the way he came. Eli follows behind, prowling like a cat.

“It’s close, isn’t it?” Eli says again. Victor wants to punch him, but he can’t hurt an illusion. Even in death, Eli is still invincible. “I can tell you’re worried about it.”

Victor doesn’t speak to anyone, doesn’t look at anyone, and leaves the building. He turns up the collar of his coat, and walks into the night. In black clothes, he blends in. Eli, always so bright, does not. It doesn’t matter—no one but Victor can see him.

“Are you mad at me?” he asks Victor. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?”

He’s not a ghost. This is not like those movies where the spirit hovers around the person they’re haunting, darting from side to side in the air. Eli’s feet are firmly on the ground and he looks like any other living human as he walks beside him, but Victor _feels_ like he’s hovering. He has an incessant energy about him, where he’s all full of life and energy and everything he had back at Lockland when they were both just two young dumbasses with too much arrogance and competitive spirit. It’s like Eli hasn’t changed at all, never lost that vibrancy. Victor can hardly remember what it feels like. And he doesn’t have time for games.

He puts his hands in his pockets and looks up at the sky. “Have been for a while, if you haven’t noticed.”

“Ah. Yea. The whole _revenge_ thing,” Eli says, wiggling his fingers in the air. “You really went all-out on that.”

“You _shot_ _me_ and I went to prison for _ten years_ ,” Victor says, bitterness tinging his words. He’s arguing with a shadow. It’s ridiculous. “I thought it was only fair to return the favor.” He doesn’t stop.

Eli winds around his side and starts walking backwards in front of him. “Oh, but is that really all it is?”

_No_.

Victor doesn’t say anything more, but the image of Eli smiles.

—

It’s late when Eli finally pinpoints Victor’s location. The sun had set hours ago and the city lights shine in through the window Eli is sitting next to, and Sydney is asleep with her dog in bed. Mitch is snoring slightly.

There are papers scattered around the whole table, open notebooks filled with scraps of files he’s printed out, all the things Mitch gained access to with his hacking abilities. Not for the first time, Eli wishes he’d had Mitch helping him instead of Serena back then. She was unstable and fiery, but Mitch is dependable as solid ground. And highly useful, he has to admit, despite originally not thinking much of the man’s abilities.

According to the CCTV footage, Victor was spotted in three different locations that point to two possible routes. Eli analyzes which of them is more likely, and finds a hotel that he thinks is the one Victor is currently staying at.

Nervousness bubbles within him. Last time he didn’t think Victor would still be there, so he wasn’t as worried. But now, with the hotel just minutes away from where they’re staying, it’s almost certain he’d be seeing him again.

Victor is probably going to try and kill him. Well, no, he’s definitely going to try and kill him, if their past encounters are anything to go by. Not that that would do much good without the serum—but that’s what he wants anyway. To rid himself of his power and this world once more, and delve back into that peaceful oblivion. Eli remembers it being cold and dark and unfeeling, where he wasn’t a body any longer, he wasn’t even a person, just a thought, an emptiness. It’s…consuming, but still far better than here and he craves it like he’s never had with anything else. 

He wakes Mitch up first, because he’s sure the girl would scream if he tried that with her. Mitch swats at him, then shoots upright, probably thinking now was the exact moment Eli had decided to try and kill them, despite them having lived and travelled together for several months. Eli fixes Mitch with a dead-pan glare, yet says nothing about it. Then Sydney is up, and things are explained, and the three of them are on the road, all ready to get what they want.

—

They reach the hotel just after midnight and sneak in through the back. Security cameras have already been disabled thanks to Mitch, and there are no guards. They quickly make their way to the elevators before they’re seen by anyone still awake and lingering about. Victor is staying in the penthouse, and nobody is at all surprised.

They’re standing right in front of his door and Sydney is pressing herself against it like her ability is fusing through solid objects rather than necromancy. Mitch is looking through the little peephole that’s too high for her to reach. Eli is in the back, forcing himself to take steady, measured breaths.

All the memories of their last meeting well up inside him and cloud his vision. Haverty’s lab, the fight with Victor…how Eli would have killed him if Sydney hadn’t shot him. He doesn’t know what to think about that—well, he does, he has thoughts, but too many of them to make sense of. And he doesn’t really want to. All he knows is that he really, really does not want to do this. He’s about to turn around and run down the hall when Sydney sets her hand on the door handle and pushes the door wide open.

Sydney glances back once, to glare at Eli.

“Don’t you dare hurt him,” she says, fire in her eyes behind that cut-glass glare.

Eli nods wordlessly, though Mitch still holds his arm as they walk in. They think he’ll rush in and attack Victor as soon as he shows any sign of his presence, but Eli wants to do the exact opposite and bolt from the room, only if it were not for Mitch’s strong grip. So much for running away. His stomach is knots that get tighter with every step into the room, but by the sound of Sydney’s cry, it seems he doesn’t have to worry. Victor _was_ here—Eli is sure of it—but he’s gone again. Just like that.

Sydney rushes at him, swinging her little fists and nothing else. It’s a drastic change from when she shot him. She was confident then, now she just looks devastated. Eli observes her batting at his chest, clawing at his face, swinging wildly while tears stream down her face. It’s an ineffective method of fighting, even with an opponent who could actually be hurt. Eli’s always been interested in how emotions always seem to tamper with people’s judgement. He stands there and watches her as she exhausts herself trying to do with her bare little fists what not even ripping out his still-beating heart could do.

People are so strange, he thinks.

Mitch pulls her away from him and hugs her, and Eli stands there silently, wondering how he could have gotten it so wrong. Victor was _just_ here. The reports were recent. He calculated for travel time, which wasn’t much since their hotels were so close together. He even thought of different circumstances to combat whatever insane scenario Victor could come up with to escape, and yet…

Here was Sydney, being held by Mitch and saying how much she missed Victor, and that she didn’t know if she’d ever see him again, and Eli is reminded of how desperate she must have been to wake up the one person she’s most afraid of just to find him. A thought occurs to him.

It seems impossible that Victor could have already left because _he was still in the hotel_.

“Don’t worry,” Eli says, and both Mitch and Sydney give him the look of Hell. “He’s still here.”

They begin to search.

—

Mitch and Sydney didn’t want to separate from Eli, because they knew what would likely happen if he got to Victor before they did. But the hotel is too big and Victor is too clever and too quick, so there isn’t much time. Mitch and Sydney go off together, because Mitch doesn’t want her wandering around a hotel at midnight, while Eli searches on his own.

This fits his own agenda, anyway.

Anything between them and Victor would surely be a happy reunion, but Eli can’t say the same for himself. He knows Victor will try and kill him, however pointless it may be—though if he’s completed the serum, it would work. Either way, it doesn’t matter to him.

Mitch and Sydney try the lobby and the commercial floors—as if Victor could be found in the hotel gift shop. Eli heads for the basement.

He doesn’t know for what purpose Victor would go down there, and what he would be able to do there that he couldn’t do in his penthouse suite, but Eli knows Victor well enough to be able to tell when he will do something solely because of principle or aesthetic. He’s always had to be dramatic, and the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the place suits him.

The opening was bright and clean, but as Eli descended the stairs, they gradually led into a deeper part of the hotel not meant for guests, lit by flickering red lights and lacking the neat paneling on the walls of the floors above. Now he’s met with concrete walls and unconcealed pipes, the steam emitting from them causing droplets to condensate on the walls and drip to the floor in steady trails. They creak and moan, which echoes through the halls, and its so humid that it’s hard even for him to breathe through the fog. Eli presses forward.

He finds a room emitting a dull blue glow from an open door. He moves toward it but steam bursts through a crack in a pipe, enveloping him in boiling hot mist. Eli just stands there, even as his skin reddens and burns, then heals up again. His breath catches in his throat at the sight in front of him when the steam finally clears.

All these near misses, and Eli thought he was prepared to see Victor again. He wasn’t. Nothing could have prepared him for this, for seeing his old nemesis again after so long, after so much had happened between them.

Eli lingers in the doorway, toeing the line between the hallway and the room Victor has chosen. The other man doesn’t seem to notice him standing there, delaying the inevitable, trying to work up the nerve to push things into motion.

He knows this will end in blood. He just finds it strange that he doesn’t want it to be Victor’s—he doesn’t feel the desire to hurt him and to make him hurt like had in the past. He remembers how it felt when he used to, but it’s a distant memory, nothing more than an echo. He doesn’t know why he cant grasp onto it again, and kind of wishes he could, so he would at least have something to hold on to.

Standing here feels like standing on the edge of a precipice. Ones step into the room will be one step off the edge, plunging himself into the black water. He wont be able to tell what his next moves will be. He supposes, then, that that is not much different from where he is now—since he has no idea what to do. He came here with a plan, but everything now seems so scattered.

Eli takes a breath and steps in.

“So…” he says. “Do we continue where we left off?”

—

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey sorry for the long hiatus~ I actually finished this story in May but the editing was holding me up, especially on this chapter. I was never satisfied with it so that's why it took so long oops, but here you go, the penultimate chapter.


	8. Eli

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which Victor is his usual self, as always.

—

8 – Eli

_You maniac you tortured artist, do you crave attention?_   
_Your shaking hands a consequence of how much you don't mention_   
_Your mind was made of magic, now it’s ugly and diseased_   
_Hell is in your hair dye and your head's between your knees._

—

He’s prepared to fight Victor. Because after everything, it always comes down to that. Always at each other throats. He’s prepared to suffer, to face unimaginable pain in every nerve because Victor’s power was always too much for the world to handle, and he had too much fun with it. Eli had braced himself for the worst, and thought he prepared quite well.

He wasn’t prepared for… _conversation_.

Eli walks into the room to see Victor standing with his back turned to him, working with a variety of different chemicals. Suspicious white powder dusts the plastic bench he’s at.

“Victor,” Eli says.

Victor barely reacts, where Eli thought he would be at least a little startled. He guesses that’s what happens when you have a personal necromancer in your arsenal—death loses its novelty.

“Oh, Eli, you’re back.”

He’s so casual about it. Doesn’t even turn around.

“I found you,” Eli says.

Victor gives a soft laugh. “You never leave.”

Eli’s jaw twitches at the dig at his power. Alright, he can play that game.

“You look like you’re doing well. How’s death treating you?”

Victor sets down the chemicals he’s working with and runs a hand through his hair, tilting his head back. He gives a heavy sigh and then rights himself, straightens out his coat, and puts up the collar even though they’re indoors with absolutely no wind chill. Eli can’t see his face completely, but his body is far past the lean willowy figure he had at Lockland. Now he’s gaunt and pale and looks more like death than Eli, who literally spent two years being dead.

“You never give up, do you?” he says.

Eli shakes his head. “I wish I could.”

Victor turns his head just the slightest bit, and Eli can see him smile. “What’s that saying? No rest for the wicked?”

Eli gives him a heavy-lidded glare. “I’ve never been the wicked one.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Victor says. He finally turns around to face Eli and his eyes go wide. “Eli,” he breathes. “You’re back.”

Eli crosses his arms over his chest and leans against a table. “It’s been established.”

Victor blinks a few times. He takes a few steps closer, and Eli tenses, bracing himself for a fight, but Victor just looks at him.

“No,” he says. “You’re really Eli and you’re really back.”

“Ah. I see death has killed off too many of your brain cells.”

Victor steps forward again, completely ignoring Eli’s deadpan insult. “No,” he runs a hand through his hair again, tousling the white-blonde locks. “You look like shit, so you’re not a hallucination!”

Eli’s eyebrow quirks up. “You’ve been hallucinating me?”

He hadn’t expected that Victor would hallucinate him. It brings back memories of his time spent in EON, locked in a glass box for years on end. Weirdly enough, it gives him a strange sense of comfort that Victor went through the same thing he did.

The confusion and amazement fades from Victor’s expression, and an almost excited grin spreads across his face. He steps forward, moving with a casual grace, unbothered. He passes a table with some miscellaneous tools and picks one up, and Eli is reminded of their last meeting in Haverty’s lab. The similarity is striking—the two of them alone together in some shady location, not having seen each other for a long time but both had been hunting the other for even longer. The darkness, the tools, the desperation.

Except this time, it’s not Victor’s but _his_.

The pale-haired man dashes toward him with his newly acquired weapon, yet Eli just presses himself to the wall and lets Victor draw a clean red line across his throat. He closes his eyes and feels the sting of the blade, the hot droplets of blood welling up around it. For a second, he can’t breathe, and somehow, despite everything that’s happened to him, he feels this animalistic sense of panic well up inside of him, but it’s gone as soon as it had come and Eli never lets it show on his face. Victor is right there in front of him, one hand on his shoulder, breath on his face. Eli won’t give him the pleasure of a reaction. He’s so close.

Then he draws back, and Eli opens his eyes.

Victor works his jaw, clearly dissatisfied. “What?” he asks. “Did you lose your spirit in death, or whatever it is you preach about all the time?”

Eli feels the wound on his throat close up, and he wipes the blood off with the back of his hand, though he merely smudges it across his neck. “Just give me the serum, Victor. That’s what I came for.”

Victor’s eyes light up with fury. Eli hasn’t seen that in a while.

“The serum I manufactured allows an EO to keep their powers, while also stabilizing them. It wouldn’t help you,” Victor says in a slow, breathy drawl, as if unaware that the two of them were quite literally at each other’s throats. He didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, Eli would say the man was enjoying himself. Reminiscing.

Eli was not enjoying himself. He only wanted one thing.

“Then where is the original serum? The one that takes away an EO’s powers? Do you have it?”

He hates the desperation that creeps into his voice. Hates it even more when he sees Victors eyes light up at sound of it, that dark glimmer he always gets when he’s excited. Victor smiles languidly, steps away, though he never turns his back. He just reaches inside his coat pocket, never breaking eye-contact.

He pulls out a little blue vial. “There’s only this one left.”

Eli lunges.

Victor raises his arm like it’s a ball, and this is an elementary school playground where he’s the tall bully who’s just stolen Eli’s favorite toy and is refusing to give it back. Eli isn’t here for games. He’s so _tired_ , and he needs that serum, wants that peace again—

“I would have given this to you,” Victor says, looking down at Eli. “I would have given it to you and enjoyed filling you with so much pain that your fragile body couldn’t _stand_ it.”

His eyes are alight, and he stands tall and proud just like he used to, despite all he’s had to face because of the glitch in his powers.

Eli grits his teeth. He was prepared for Victor to try and get as much sadistic glee out of this as possible, and he was ready for it. He’s lived a life of people hurting him, and this wouldn’t be any different.

“Then get on with it,” he grinds out.

Victor smiles, a small and nearly imperceptible quirk of the lips. It’s soft, and sad, and most of all, disappointed. He looks so calm that Eli can tell he’s absolutely livid.

“No,” Victor says. He leans down close to Eli’s face and Eli tries to go for the serum, but Victor still has it held too far over his head. Eli curses their height difference.

“You became boring.”

Victor says three little words, and with them, destroys any remaining bit of hope Eli Ever had.

Victor throws the vial to the ground and Eli cries out, but before he can do anything, Victor crushes it under his black boot. It makes a sickening crunch that twists Eli’s stomach, and suddenly he’s on the floor. He doesn’t care that it looks pathetic, or even that from this position Victor could easily kick him in the face and send him flying across the room, but he doesn’t do that. He just lifts his foot and takes a step back, and Eli runs his hands through the neon blue stain filled with broken glass.

He feels he should say something. Swear at victor. Curse him. Damn him. Damn him to Hell. Ask him _why_.

He doesn’t do any of those things, and it is Victor who speaks instead.

“I think you’ve forgotten, Eli,” Victor says. “I don’t _like_ killing people. I only do it out of necessity.”

He moves toward Eli, on his knees by the ruined serum, fingers stained neon blue and blood red. He brushes a hand across Eli’s cheek as he passes, a feather-light touch that’s so unlike him yet fits him perfectly at the same time. Eli turns his face with it, seeing Victor stand before the open doorway, the white of the fluorescent hallway lights illuminating him from behind. Against all logic, his coat flaps a little in some non-existent breeze, as if once again, the universe has coincided with Victor’s plans if only just to make him look more dramatic.

“And I don’t need to kill you anymore.”

He disappears after that, probably to go back to Sydney and Mitch, or to avoid them completely and disappear again—whatever suits his needs. That leaves Eli on the floor, desperately tracking his fingers through spilled serum and shattered glass.

His hands shake and his fingers split, bleed, heal, and bleed again, but he doesn’t stop. He tries to get whatever’s left of the original serum into his blood, using the glass shards to puncture his veins, dragging them up his arm and watching as the wounds heal too fast to do anything with. He remains like that for a while, trying to get the serum to take away his powers like it did the first time, but it’s not enough.

It’s never enough.

—

_The End_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are! The end! I know this was a short fic, but I promise I'm not leaving it there. This was originally going to be the only one, but then I came with more ideas, so I have at least two more stories after this planned out. I just need to...write them.  
> I can't believe the amount of support I got for this fic omg. When I first started, I thought that nobody would read it so I'm super happy that people like this--my characterization of these characters, the storyline, the dynamics, the writing style. I love all of you that commented such nice things <3  
> Fun fact: I actually wrote this chapter before any of the others, and it's one of my favorites (after the church scene).  
> See you soon!  
> ~theangelswans


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